In Blood and Belonging, an account of the largely unforeseen “new nationalisms” that sprung up after the end of the Cold War, Ignatieff begins to hit his stride as a public commentator. The book’s strengths are its timeliness (1993, a year after Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy, a time when “the withering away of the nationstate” had almost become a cliché); its cast of characters (Serbian warlords, a souverainiste bank president); and its onthe- ground narrative. It is a cultural and political travelogue with stops in Yugoslavia, Germany, Ukraine, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, and Quebec, and encounters with nationalists of all kinds.
Ignatieff recoils from the violence and falsity of much that he has seen. Yet he concludes that the problem is not nationalism per se, but its chauvinistic ethnic variety — the nationalism that defiantly denies membership to those outside the tribe. This is a nationalism blinded by the “narcissism of small differences” —Sigmund Freud’s notion that we hate most profoundly those who are closest to us. “Civic” nationalism, a national identity based on shared political practices and shared values, is more difficult to achieve, but is desirable because it meets our need for belonging without being ethnocentric. In other words, the liberal democratic nation- state allows for the creation of a common heritage among people with radically different histories.
Blood and Belonging has a personal dimension for Ignatieff, who has family ties to Ukraine and to Quebec, and who lived in the former Yugoslavia as a child. Visiting the crypt in Ukraine where his great-grandfather is buried, he discovers that a butcher has used his ancestor’s grave to cut meat. The experience prompts a cri de coeur:
Nations and graves. Graves and nations. Land is sacred because it is where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves. The graves were profaned. The butchers slaughtered on top of the marble. A person would fight to stop this if he could.
He goes on: “Looking back, I see that time in the crypt as the moment when I began to change, when some element of respect for the national project be- gan to creep into my feelings.” The post-national, cosmopolitan consciousness that Ignatieff had acquired began to seem like a privilege of Western elites — those who can rely on a stable nation-state to return to and therefore have the luxury of forgetting that even old-fashioned Westphalian states are no simple task to maintain.
Reading this, one thinks: This is not how academics operate. You don’t admit coming to accept a certain brand of nationalism because you felt something in a crypt. You mention a theory. You cite new social science. In the worst case, you admit that your critics pointed out something you didn’t know. But you don’t let your feelings into it!
The crypt incident reveals the soft inner side of Ignatieff’s liberalism, which recognizes humans as conflicted, emotional beings, incapable of being defined by one overarching characteristic. In A Just Measure of Pain, Ignatieff expresses skepticism about the social-scientific view that humans can be gauged and explained by rational means alone. In The Needs of Strangers, he rejects the economic supposition that material self-interest is behaviour’s primary motor. In Blood and Belonging, his views about human nature begin to resemble those of Isaiah Berlin, whom Ignatieff describes as “an intuitive thinker, interested . . . in inner anguish, personal dilemmas, and the conflict between human values.”
Berlin regarded human beings, both individually and collectively, as fundamentally divided. Rather than trying to straighten what Kant called the “crooked timber of humanity” by imposing one supreme vision of how to live, a liberal polity’s task is to accommodate human duality by providing a peaceful realm where individuals are free to discover who they are and choose their own vision of the good. Self-discovery and choice, however, are often linked to a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself — a culture or tradition with which one can identify and where one can feel understood. It was for this reason that Berlin supported the creation of the state of Israel, which he maintained would grant Jews the freedom to decide whether to embrace their ancestral culture. Ignatieff’s willingness to recognize Quebec as distinct is based on similar thinking.
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